Bad performance in settlements, hardware underutilized

[DankRafft]

I read a lot of times that FO4 has issues rendering specific areas in the game. What I don't get is why my FPS drop down in settlements (Sim Settlements mod) while my hardware is way less than 50% stressed.

 

Is that normal behavior of the engine?

 

[JimmyRJump]

Bad optimisation all over is what's the cause. Last saturday, I went from an RX470 to a Vega64 and apart from a few exceptions like College Square, my framerate is identical... go figure...

[DankRafft]

Damn, that's annoying. Guess I'll have to live with it and refrain from using an ENB or use another (lower) BethINI preset. What a pitty.

[DankRafft]

I've fixed it by replacing my 4k texture mods with 2k ones. Loading screen times halved and game running at constant 60 FPS with every setting on max, even with an ENB now. You'd think that a 11GB VRAM graphics card could easily handle 4k textures but it seems the engine has issues with it.

[JimmyRJump]

I've fixed it by replacing my 4k texture mods with 2k ones. Loading screen times halved and game running at constant 60 FPS with every setting on max, even with an ENB now. You'd think that a 11GB VRAM graphics card could easily handle 4k textures but it seems the engine has issues with it.

You know, as of version 1.3 or 1.4 of FO4, they switched from direct rendering of textures to an in-game streaming system to alleviate stress on the GPU. But that never worked like it should because of bad optimisation for RAM use. That's why sometimes some textures stay blurry after a while because the RAM doesn't get flushed completely -if at all- and the "new" textures only get partially loaded, resulting in a mish-mash of cllean, crisp textures and soupy ones.

 

I think the latter is also the reason why you get all kinds of different framerate results in one single spot while looking around and back in the original direction: you start at 60fps and when having swiveled around 360 degrees, you end-up with 35fps...

[TheBlindSnake]

Did you try allowing multiple CPU cores to run and toggling vsync settings? You can use fallout4 config tweaker to do so easily, it helped me a lot with fps issues, goodbye stuttering! Also changing bokeh to standard Depth of field can help in some areas for nearly no loss in graphic quality, mostly affects vats and even then barely but can make quite an impact for fps. Try using the insignificant object remover mod also for more fps boost for no visual loss, just removes some useless garbage read the mod description for more details. In the same line of thought, you can go in FO4 tweaker and change the grass setting from 20 to 40 after using insignificant object remover if the value isn't already modified by it. Basic changes for no loss in quality but a boost in performance which might allow you to go back to having your 4k textures running smooth.

[DankRafft]

Basic changes for no loss in quality but a boost in performance which might allow you to go back to having your 4k textures running smooth.

I don't need the 4k textures. When I'm playing the game (instead of starring at textures) I won't notice the difference, only on weapons and armor (I kept those).

 

And regarding the CPU cores: AFAIK Fallout 4 only uses four cores max. Setting iNumHWThreads to anything above that won't make a difference. Some users even stated that this settings doesn't do anything in F4.

 

What do you mean by "toggling vsync"? Deactivating it? If so, mine is already deactivated.

Edited May 21, 2018 by DankRafft